Marketing: Guerrilla-style tactics to win freesheet war?

Victory in the battle of the freebies will need a strategy that is both creative and aggressive

THE battle of the freesheets has begun in earnest in Dublin, where commuters run the gauntlet of knapsack-toting distributors eager to off-load one of the 50,000 copies of either Metro or Herald AM.

The trend is not confined to the capital, a free publication has been introduced in Donegal while a Cork title has been relaunched recently. Is it only a matter of time before free newspapers start taking a bigger slice of the estimated €980m newspaper advertising market?

Not unless their marketing approach changes, say media analysts. “There certainly seems to be room for growth and there are more of them around,” said Fiona Scott of MCM Communications, the media arm of advertising agency McConnells. “But they are not a licence to print money. Only those with greater editorial quality will succeed.”

These papers need to show people that although they are free, they still have value. “People associate